My casual faith in America is the part of me -- thoroughly grounded in white privilege -- that has believed without overmuch reflection that our country values equality of all races at its core; that our laws and policing are color blind in their practice; that the efforts of politicians, business leaders and clergy are sincerely geared towards serving all the people; and that America is steadily progressing on the path towards a 'more perfect union,' to quote our president.

My 'faith' in America was based on things hoped for but as yet unseen (to borrow from Hebrews 11:1). But more importantly, it was based on things hoped for, but not worked for -- at least not very hard. Contrary to much that I intellectually knew to be true about the vicious, pernicious nature of racism, I held onto a lazy faith that racism in America would slowly erode itself through some kind of magical process of good will that required little of me aside from a friendly disposition and a hopeful spirit.

That faith, which was blind and useless, died when I watched the video of Eric Garner being choked to death at the hands of an officer who has now been let off without even a trial.

I thank God for my loss of faith.

Because one thing I know is that blind faith is dangerous -- by what it does and what it leaves undone. In this case, my blind, casual, easy 'faith' in America stood by while daily violence was done to my black sisters and brothers and I did essentially nothing to help. The image of Eric Garner's outstretched hand as he was being suffocated reaches out towards all of us bystanders with an unanswered plea for help, for mercy, for justice.

We would not just walk by a dying person on the street and do nothing, but neither should we ignore our nation when its health is in serious decline.

That goes double for those working in one of the three branches of government, who take an oath to preserve a healthy government.

Thus, the immunity plague seems to be infecting their minds to the point that a "the king can do no wrong" pathogenic meme has overtaken American government.

This certainly includes cops, who are instruments of the administrative branch of governments, and who are in a pathogenic trance induced in part by that certain American faith which can blind the mind:

... research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and--to top it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a would-be dictator. As Hitler is reported to have said, “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.” [The Authoritarians, page 81, PDF]...
The Government presents an impressive array of theories which would preclude it from any liability ... we ... hold that the Government should escape unscathed ... It is often said that the doctrine of sovereign immunity is a derivative of the common law maxim "The King can do no wrong." But conceptually it is far older. Zeus himself carried an aegis or breastplate, a buckler, and a thunderbolt which made him, the mythological sovereign, immune from all that could beset him. And common law provided its sovereign with the immunity of Zeus ... The tide of history is running clearly against the concept of sovereign immunity. The disfavor into which the doctrine has fallen was observed as far back as ... 1939 ... [and] this Court pointed out that the assault upon the citadel of immunity continues presently apace. [De Bardeleben Marine v. U.S.]...
During that legendary era when royal fictions were being conceived and cherished, it is said that a court favorite returning from afar brought home to his Queen a highly decorative undergarment for the royal legs. Details leaked to the peasants, and the incident became the object of much idle speculation and some embellishment. Suspecting that the Queen's carefully concealed legs had become the table topic of the realm, the court one day officially decreed: "The Queen has no legs". So was another royal fiction born. Thanks to what might loosely be called keen judicial notice, this one was never a part of the common law. Even in American legal circles it has been generally conceded that the anatomy of a female sovereign differs neither in form nor substance from the standard of a reasonable woman. But other fictions of the resourceful and imaginative European courts have proved hardier, and some, like "the King can do no wrong", survived transplanting to a completely foreign political climate to thrive as conspicuous anachronisms. The royal fiction of sovereign immunity has long been the despair of American legal writers. Legislatively, piecemeal attacks on it date from the mid-nineteenth century. But the doctrine has been jealously guarded in the courts, statutes purporting to waive immunity have been strictly construed, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed sovereign immunity in tort claims. Against this backdrop, pressures for a federal statute ameliorating the harsh immunity doctrines being pursued in federal courts mounted steadily in the early decades of the twentieth century. [Twilight Zone of Federal Tort, page one, emphasis added]

Yes it's no use saying that you don't know nothing
It's still gonna get you if you don't do something
Sitting on a fence that's a dangerous course
Oh, you could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force
Even the hero gets a bullet in the chest
Oh yeah, once upon a time in the west

This is a similar pattern to the Los Angeles area Rampart Division scandal.

In that case when the City Counsel saw the evidence, they consented to the feds taking over and cleaning up the joint:

The Los Angeles City Council voted 10 to 2 to accept a consent decree allowing a federal judge acting on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice to oversee and monitor reforms within the L.A.P.D. for a period of five years. In agreeing to the consent decree, the Justice Department -- which had been investigating the L.A.P.D. since 1996 for excessive force violations -- agreed not to pursue a civil rights lawsuit against the city. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and L.A.P.D. Chief Bernard Parks initially opposed the consent decree, but backed down when it became clear that it was supported by the city council. Riordan signed the consent decree in November 2000....In the first criminal case stemming from Perez's allegations, Sgt. Edward Ortiz, Brian Liddy, Paul Harper and Michael Buchanan, all of the Rampart CRASH unit, were tried on charges of perjury, fabricating arrests and filing false police reports.

(PBS Rampart, emphasis added). Hundreds who had been falsely framed by the rogue cops were freed from prison by the time the feds completed their mission.

The citizen journalist in the Garner case says that the cops planted a .25 calibre pistol so

they could get revenge on him for filming them while they killed Garner.

When the soldiers get out of the military many of them become police officers, where, as they rise through the ranks the inject their military doctrines into the police force which eventually becomes dangerous to the local community (War to the Horizon; Will The Military Become The Police? - 10).

Blaming the citizenry for rebellious acts of government and the oil industry is like saying that being raped is the fault of women for being born in India, where rape is an everyday news factor.

Oil-Qaeda is spending big money on an expanding blame the victim propaganda campaign to try to divert attention from itself (as a member of the trinity, it has powerful comrades: MOMCOM: A Mean Welfare Queen).

One tactic is to ask a question ("what nation is to blame") which diverts attention from Oil-Qaeda:

... there’s no debate among the world’s scientists about which country is “most responsible.” That is, about which nation has injected the greatest amount of the heat-trapping invisible gas CO2 into to the atmosphere, where a lot of it remains for years, piling up and only adding to the heat.

The answer: United States has, with China a distant second.

And figured on a per person basis, the “most responsible” is the United Kingdom, with the United States a close second, Germany a close third, and China a distant seventh.

If you’re surprised the “most to blame” isn’t China, the explanation is simple:

In about 2007, China did pass the United States in putting the greatest amount of CO2 into the air per year, but China’s economic boom only got started recently and they still have a couple of decades to go (if there are no drastic changes) before they catch up with the United States in the total cumulative amount of heat-trapping CO2 they will have been piling up in the air.

(ABC News). The blaming of a nation misses the point that one particular international industry is by far the most guilty of promoting and securing addiction to fossil fuels.

The Oil-Qaeda blame-the-victim strategy is like blaming smokers, or blaming schools, for tobacco and asbestos, rather than blaming the lying, deceiving tobacco and asbestos industry for a cancer epidemic they knew they were causing and covering up (see The Exceptional American Denial).

The Oil-Qaeda advocacy of the firing of a shotgun into a crowd is not sophisticated justice, it is rank brutality, because we have the ability to narrow it down to the prime source (charging the guilty but leaving the innocent free from charges).

Several Dredd Blog series and posts over the years have pointed the finger directly toward Oil-Qaeda and its enablers (see the Series Posts Tab at the top of each Dredd Blog page).

So, don't fall for the Oil-Qaeda blame-the-victim campaign, fight that blame-the-victim trance, because Oil-Qaeda is the guilty one.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

In a recent post I pointed out a difference between the concepts of "origin" and "history."

I wrote "... 'origin' and 'history' are not the same concept; 'origin' is primarily emergence into existence for the first time, while 'history' is primarily what happens after that" (On The Origin of Comets).

In this series about conspiracy theory I have tried to hold as closely to that definition as possible, by pointing out that conspiracy is something that originated before humans came into existence, something that originated in the microbial world billions of years before humans, the world that has more biomass and population than all other life forms on this planet (On The Origin of "Conspiracy Theory" - 4).

It is utterly brain-dead to try a poo-poo the reality of conspiracy theory, as establishment propagandists have found out, so they are now offering a "reason" why conspiracy theory exists.

They are doing so without even considering the origin.

Instead, they confuse recent history with the billion year old origin.

This is typical trite nonsense from paid anti-conspiracy nuts, which we exposed in previous posts of this series:

In fact, you might be surprised how many conspiracy theories are handled by the federal and state governments on a daily basis:

Over one-quarter of all federal criminal prosecutions and a large number of state cases involve prosecutions for conspiracy.

(Conspiracy Theory, 112 Yale L.J. 1307 (2003), Preface, emphasis added). That is a lot of real, serious as a heart attack, beyond a reasonable doubt, and well documented occurrences of "conspiracy theories" going on in reality before the eyes of anyone who wants to see them.

Notice the legal reality that conspiracy is a separate crime, different from the planned crime yet-to-be-done:

Consider how a law school textbook might introduce the elements of traditional conspiracy law: Imagine that Joe and Sandra agree to rob a bank. From the moment of agreement, they can be found guilty of conspiracy even if they never commit the robbery (it’s called “inchoate liability”). Even if the bank goes out of business, they can still be liable for the conspiracy (“impossibility” is not a defense). Joe can be liable for other crimes that Sandra commits to further the conspiracy’s objective, like hot-wiring a getaway car (it’s called “Pinkerton” liability, after a 1946 Supreme Court case involving tax offenses). He can’t evade liability by staying home on the day of the robbery (a conspirator has to take an affirmative step to “withdraw”). And if the bank heist takes place, both Joe and Sandra can be charged with bank robbery and with the separate crime of conspiracy, each of which carries its own punishment (the crime of conspiracy doesn’t “merge” with the underlying crime). Why should conspiracy liability begin at the moment of “agreement,” before any crime is committed? Why can a conspirator be charged with both the inchoate offense of conspiracy and the robbery? Why should the law punish conspirators even if it’s impossible for them to commit the crime they planned? Why is withdrawal from a conspiracy so difficult?

(ibid, "Conspiracy Theory", Article, PDF), emphasis added). Remember that those "conspiracy theories" happen every day when a criminal prosecutor has a conspiracy theory of the case in criminal conspiracy prosecutions.

One of the most important comments on deceit ... was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries — in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI,when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control ...

(Chomsky and Trivers, emphasis added). That fabrication of reality is fading fast a century later.

in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East....
Goldberg pointed to Americans' evolving answer to one particular poll question since the 1950s. "The poll question was, 'Do you trust the government to do what is right all or most of the time? And in the 1950s," he said, "75 percent of Americans [back then] answered, 'Yes, I trust the government to do what is right all or most of the time.'" But "what's happened since then is this tremendous erosion of trust and faith in the federal government. And you can see it through Vietnam, you can see it through Watergate, you could see it through the 1980s and 1990s, such that by the time the year 2000 rolls around, you have a mirror image -- that is, 25 percent of Americans [now] trust the government to do what is right all or most of the time."

Monday, December 1, 2014

Some say "it was about the victory of the St. Louis Rams over his homies the Oakland Raiders (52-0)," some say "his feelings were hurt because some in the GOP think he is a RINO," others say "it was Yardbirds stroking Joe Joe's Smokestack Lightening," while yet others say "it was simply the Java the Joe."

I implore him to follow Mika's suggestion and find another fantasy football team, or perhaps teach the current 1-11 Oakland team how to play football gooder (like you did goober when you were "little").

Or was his rant because those St. Louis Rams, in their own home town, held their hands up before the game and said "don't shoot" (without first asking St. Joe Joe for permission?).

Whatever the "reason," like most insecure wannabe "protectors and servers" in the mold of Darren Wilson, Joe Joe shot his wad.

Little wonder that long ago Morning Joe quit his day job of trying to be a lawyer.

I don't know if his Alma Mater (Red-Neck Law School) taught grand jury law or not, but if so that school either taught it wrong or Morning Joe cared little to nothing about learning grand jury law (UNITED STATES v. WILLIAMS).

Joe Joe evidently choose to attend make-up class instead.

Here is the straight scoop from a lawyer who was once a law student who did not miss grand jury class: The Ferguson Lie.

So, Morning Joe is still unable to tell the difference between a grand and a petite jury, so he does make-up work and calls it journalism or something like that (Why Trial By Jury?).

Yep, Joe Joe is behaving like a concert pianist who doesn't know the difference between a grand piano and a zydeco rubboard.

Doesn't he know that he can't make music-pabulum on his bread and circus show (to ease the worries of his fanatic red meat fans) if the truth gushes out of the caverns of his failed "logic" ... which he still calls points?

His score was the same as the Raiders.

A grand jury is not a place to try the ultimate facts, that is the place of a petite jury:

It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

In today's post I want to tie in Oil-Qaeda's war on methanol and elucidate upon methods they have used for many decades to deprive civilization of security.

Yes, how Oil-Qaeda has deprived civilization of safer sources of fuels, safer transportation, safer power plant generation of electricity, and have purposefully placed civilization on suicide watch just to enrich themselves at the expense of humanity (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, 2, 3, 4).

Their conspiracy to destroy clean fuelled public transportation, which was based on electric vehicles, has been documented in history, as has the criminal prosecutions of those corporations for doing so.

But, by the time they were stopped the damage had already been done to that clean public transportation system.

III. Government Sponsorship

Undeterred, Oil-Qaeda always finds ways to get cosy with other departments of government:

"One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department" - John D. Rockefeller (1909)"

Political events which, oddly enough, were based on a notion of a looming Battle of Armageddon:

From the moment he arrived at the Admiralty, a young man of destiny, Churchill started to prepare the fleet for the Battle of Armageddon he believed was inevitable.
...
Then, in 1911, the German Kaiser provoked the Agadir crisis ... Churchill went to the Admiralty and his outlook transformed. He was immediately confronted

How "our" oil got under "their" sands

with the decisive question: to convert the navy from coal to oil ... the "fateful plunge" was made ... in April 1912 ... five oil-burning battleships were approved.
...
It was the Royal Navy which was the impetus for the development of the oil industry in Britain. The problem was supply and the security of that supply. Initially, the British government purchased shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, subsequently, British Petroleum [BP].
...
Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined the race to control Middle Eastern oil.

A common addiction which eventually grew to the point that it gave new meaning to "it's in their blood."

IV. Oil Blooded Economy

The result is well known, which is explained by the United States Department of Energy in a blunt but revealing statement:

"Oil is the lifeblood of America’s economy."

(The Fleets & Terrorism Follow The Oil). The oil wars are also part of the puzzle, because "if we do not control the oil supply, we do not control our economic life," according to an Oil-Qaeda propaganda mantra.

But, now that the lifeblood has been found to be toxic to our planet, and destructive to our climate system, we now have to continually consider how to perform a blood transfusion (Do We Need A Blood Transfusion?).

And we wonder how we lost our collective minds by following leaders who led us to become addicted to a deadly poison (The Peak of Sanity - 3).

So, how is it that with all our democratic and scientific prowess we missed the gravity of the situation and missed the dangers to us all by not asking "what could go wrong?"

V. Methanol Was A Hundred Years Old Then

It is not like methanol had not yet been invented by that time, no, methanol was all grown up and robust by the time of the turn of events toward the fall of civilization into oil addiction:

" ... methanol has been one of the world’s most widely used industrial chemicals since the 1800s."

(Methanol Institute, "Methanol Basics"). Anything like the electric public transportation that was coming into existence as oil continued to be pumped into the bloodstream of Western Civilization, Oil-Qaeda attacked.

It attacked anything clean that it saw as a challenger to dirty oil.

Even the early automobiles, such as the Ford Model T, which could use methanol as a fuel (because the Model T, like other vehicles then, had a "flex fuel" engine) were eventually re-engineered to use only oil derived fuels.

The same is still true in today's world of flex fuel engines, and still true of the aggressions of Oil-Qaeda (there is a plan to get rid of them).

The "problem" with methanol use is the same as it was with the clean public transportation that Oil-Qaeda took out (if it isn't an oil user it is to be abolished).

It is not that the clean fuels won't work quite well, rather, it is just that clean fuel has been continually and unfairly suppressed via the surreptitious politics of Oil-Qaeda.

What exactly was and is still being suppressed, fuel methanol, is a worthy transitional liquid fuel and/or additive that could detoxify many a now-toxic source:

Increasingly, methanol is being employed around the globe in a number of innovative applications to meet our growing demand for energy. Methanol is a clean energy option that can be produced from natural gas, coal and a number of renewable resources including biomass, landfill gas and power plant or industrial emissions. As economically recoverable energy resources become scarcer globally, methanol will play an increasingly important role in the diversification of fuel choices and the promotion of clean energy applications in countries worldwide.

Methanol’s characteristics as a liquid fuel at room temperature and the diverse sources from which methanol can be manufactured, make it an attractive alternative fuel for cars, trucks and buses. Methanol is also used as an input to the biodiesel production process, as well as a feedstock for the production of dimethyl ether, a clean burning liquid gas used primarily for cooking and heating applications, but also a suitable replacement for diesel fuel. In addition, methanol is a unique resource for use in on-grid and off-grid power turbines for electricity production, and an ideal hydrogen carrier for fuel cell technology applications including portable power.

This simple molecule packed with hydrogen and no carbon-to-carbon bonds burns cleaner than most energy sources and provides a viable, readily available alternative to traditional fossil fuels. As demand for alternative energy and fuels grows, methanol is positioned to provide the power needed for numerous applications in our daily lives.

(Methanol Institute, "Energy"). It is also significant that methanol can be made anywhere, that is, it is not geographically limited to the sands of the Middle East nations.

Nevertheless, during the late 1800s and early 1900s war planning, politics, and design of ocean and land vehicles settled in on the developing notion of a foreign policy which required control of the Middle East by Western Civilization.

Oil eventually became the drug of choice, even though it required a colonial type of control over the Middle East via an extremely expensive, trillion dollar a year, military (MOMCOM - A Mean Welfare Queen).

Those military costs are socialized and propagandised to be a dynamic of creating western freedom, rather than their true purpose of protecting the profits of Oil-Qaeda.

That strategy also required the creation of propaganda machines to control the thinking of citizens in the nations of Western Civilization (The Deceit Business, 2, 3).

VI. Enter Modern Oil-Qaeda Propaganda

Consider that one important, out in the open, and real-world experiment using methanol-fuelled-vehicles actually worked well.

It was a needed and expected harbinger of things to come, until Oil-Qaeda intervened and funded political suppression and manipulation to stop it.

Suppression of success developed when Oil-Qaeda overtly corrupted the picture again:

The State of California has had an experimental methanol program that ran for 15 years in the 1980s and 1990s ... The assessment of both state officials and of Ford motor company was that is was successful.
...
In 1981, Ford delivered 40 dedicated methanol fueled Escorts to Los Angeles (LA) County. Four refueling stations were installed throughout the county, including two in underground garages. The experience gained with these initial refueling stations added considerably to the knowledge base required for methanol-compatible infrastructure, as well as identifying the ventilation requirements for underground installations. The 200-mile driving range of the vehicle also made it clear that four stations were inadequate to cover the territorial driving requirements of LA County. But the drivers of the vehicles loved the performance, offering 20 per cent more power than their gasoline-powered cousins and a 15 per cent improvement in fuel efficiency.

A paper dedicated to that methanol try out history concurs with California's success, but points out that an opposition to it, from within, was funded by Oil-Qaeda:

Opposition [from Oil-Qaeda] soon emerged to the expanding demonstration programs for clean, non-petroleum alternative transportation fuels in California. Signs of this opposition appeared for example, at a dedication ceremony for the ARCO M85 fueling facility in Sacramento, the state capitol on March 21, 1990. On this occasion, Commission Chairman Charles Imbracht, Governor George Deukmejian and ARCO President George Babikian [of Oil-Qaeda] took part in the dedication of an M85 fueling facility installed at an ARCO station located just nine blocks from the Capitol building.

After remarks from Chairman Imbrecht and Governor Deukmejian regardeing fuel methanol and the state's efforts to develop the potential for this promising alternative, non-petroleum fuel, Babikian [of Oil-Qaeda] used the occasion to announce the commencement of the U.S. Auto\Oil Study, a reported $2 billion cooperative effort between the three U.S. auto manufacturers and fourteen major oil companies [Oil-Qaeda]. The research effort would study methanol and reformulated gasoline, among other things, and was expected to assert the probably ascendancy of reformulated gasoline as the favored motor fuel, in comparison mainly with fuel methanol.

(Fifteen Years of Fuel Methanol Distribution). In other words, Oil-Qaeda sabotaged the process by declaring that their own research which had not yet been done would "show" that this 15 year old successful methanol fuel demonstration had not been successful.

Yes, Oil-Qaeda started a propaganda campaign and chipped in $2,000,000,000 to get the lies off to a "good" start.

With additional monies, such as campaign contributions, Oil-Qaeda worked against any clean methanol energy success from then on.

Eventually, the then governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, shut down California's efforts.

VII. Conclusion

Once we followed those leaders who were taking us down the path of addiction to dirty oil, we could never take only one quick step back to the place we began.

No, recovery requires going through most or all of the multiple steps necessary to get back.

What was and is required is a step by step reversal of the colossal mistake (and it may now be too late).

We could have kicked the addiction more easily all along the way by switching to a fuel like methanol which works within the existing infrastructure.

That "use the infrastructure we have now" tactic eases the significant burden required to correct the very, very grave mistake our culture made long ago.

Anyway, this post is getting a bit long, so this series will be continued on another day.

The previous post in this series is here.
A list of key times within the following video ...
(Note: GW = global warming; GG = greenhouse gas, CC = climate change):

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